Dirty Projectors

You could say Dirty Projectors are in a state of flux. The band's sixth studio album, Swing Lo Magellan, was recorded without keyboardist/vocalist Angel Deradoorian, who's currently on hiatus, and with a new drummer, Mike Johnson. (Brian McOmber, the ex-hardcore drummer who came on board around the time of Rise Above, left the band amicably.) But the group has always mutated and shifted around its center, David Longstreth, a multi-instrumentalist songwriter/arranger who rarely uses the same cast for more than a couple of records in a row.

So it's more accurate to say that it's business as usual for the band. "One of the things that's been consistent about Dirty Projectors is that the band reinvents itself," Longstreth said, "and that we're not one of these bands that does one thing sublimely well over and over and over again, until people don't need it anymore. It's about taking risks and with all the glory and hideous failure that that entails." Longstreth told me Swing Lo, to my ears their most listenable, song-based record to date, "asks a lot of questions, and it comes from that curious place, the place where you start from as opposed to the stage where you end up on." (It's streaming in full at the The New York Times.)

Over the past couple of weeks, I met with Longstreth on two different rooftops in Brooklyn to discuss the record (I should note that we know each other socially). We also touched on the subjects of Nicki Minaj, new country, Kanye West, and Longstreth's directorial debut, a Dirty Projectors' film called Hi Custodian.

"We got this handwritten-note PDF from Jay-Z inviting us to do it. It was just: 'I'm holding a festival. I want you to be there.' It seemed pretty classy. His handwriting is interesting. It's more rounded than I thought it would be. It's gonna be a fucking awesome show."

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Pitchfork: You've said that an idea behind Swing Lo Magellan was to write individual songs as opposed to an overall concept. I thought that was the case with Bitte Orca as well. Is this taking it a step further?

DL: Bitte Orca was about making an emblem of the touring band that we had become and creating this caricature out of our individual personas; at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, it felt like rock music was a cartoon in some ways. But I feel like the world is super different now than it was in 2009. And to get at something that's somewhat darker, harsher, rougher, and a bit more challenging feels right.

Bitte Orca was this collection of really bright, iridescent surfaces, and this one is more like unbleached fucking leather, or untreated wood that's warping in the elements. We did that on purpose. I don't know if it's less of an immediate record, but I think you can go a lot further into this one than you could go into Bitte. This album is more personal; you could say Bitte is about the idea of songs, but these are just songs. It's less about self-consciously appropriating elements of other styles and putting them together in some clever way.

The album was written and recorded over about a year, so there's a lot of different vibes on it. "Gun Has No Trigger", for example, is this very dramatic, somewhat claustrophobic slab of minimalism, but I don't think there's another song that's really like that on the record.

Pitchfork: As far as the album being personal, the lyrics seem to focus on your relationship with Amber, and the cover includes you two and another guy.

DL: That was our one neighbor [in upstate, New York, where we were recording]. His name is Gary. He was just a really nice guy. The longer we were there, the better we got to know him. He would come down and just hang out for a while. My brother took that photo. I don't remember it being taken, but afterwards we were looking through photos and I just liked it a lot.

Pitchfork: There are these love songs on the album, and then there's something like "Just From Chevron", which takes place against the backdrop of an oil spill.

DL: Yeah. It's not all love songs; there's a varied subject matter from song to song. "Just From Chevron" is like a topical song. There was one point when I was writing songs last year and I thought about the kind of lyrics I'd written before, and a lot of them are so abstract-- they mean something to me and maybe they'll mean something totally different to someone else. There's a certain power in vague language, but I started to get more into the idea of really trying to have a discrete thought in the lyrics and to have songs that were about stuff-- to try to make things more coherent.

But maybe the expectation that what a lyric means to you is not what it's going to mean to someone else is at the core of an idea like Dirty Projectors; maybe it's just very contrary of me to try to write simple shit. I don't know. I just don't want to do the same thing over and over again. I do feel like the hardest thing is to do something simple and tap into whatever remains of our common language rather than cultivating your own willfully esoteric vocabulary.

Pitchfork: The closing track "Irresponsible Tune" feels especially direct-- the way the vocals are treated strikes me as something John Lennon would've put to tape with Yoko Ono.

DL: That song asks a question about how we all spend so much energy creating and consuming these images of ourselves. That's the substance of our lives right now. And that's what any kind of art-making is as well-- you're just creating these emblems, images, pictures. The song is meant to be a question about what that is; I'm not sure if it's an affirmation or not. That's the tricky thing: Lyrically, I wanted the album to bring up specific things that we could all be on the same page about. But then, when it comes down to it, I don't feel like I have any answers. I don't know shit. What I found out is that I have a lot of questions and weird, murky equivocations.

Pitchfork: There are loose, unexpected moments on the album like, at one point, we hear Amber ask when she and Haley should coming in with the harmony. These asides got me thinking about theatricality, stage whispers, studio chatter. It's like you've kept everything in.

DL: The idea of letting a recording be a moment in time appealed to me. With digital recording, it's easy to create a perfect text of whatever song you have, but we kept on coming back to imperfection and fragility.

Pitchfork: It seems like you're putting more faith in hooks and melodies on this album, instead of arrangements and textures.

DL: I think so. I've been obsessed with arrangement for a long time, and this one is not about that. It's about the words and the language and the melodies. You could call it more basic and conventional, but that's the challenge: If I just focus on the most straight-up shit, is there something there, or is it just a brightly colored cloud? To me, it feels like a risk to have done that.